by David Geer
Contact the author at geercom@windstream.net
Artificial Intelligence Brings
Humanoid Robots to Life
Researchers have a variety of goals for artificial intelligence.
Some scientists are examining human biology together with artificial
intelligence in an effort to create robots that are as humanlike as possible.
Still others examine AI from an engineering perspective, begging the question,
what can robots be enabled to do?
Nao robot shown with
human hand (for scale).
The mere building blocks for advancing
AI for humanoid robots are many and
highly technical. Robotic vision via web
cams and machine vision, natural
language processing and machine
learning, common sense reasoning and
knowledge, robotic agility and motion,
and robot-to-human-to-robot interaction
are a few of the areas of research that
will move us closer to more human-like
robots. What research areas will have to
emerge to take us there? Will we know
before we get there?
Let there be light!
Robot machine vision leaps
forward thanks to real time
image processing.
Ten years ago, processor speed was not fast
enough to enable real time video image
processing. Today, it is. “Real time processing of
video images means we can now put cameras on
robots and have them understand the world
through video images,” says Professor Peter Stone,
Department of Computer Sciences, University of
Texas at Austin.
A decade or more ago, roboticists could only
use sonar range finders in a single dimension to
discover how far the robot was from the nearest
wall. This gave the robots no information about
faces for face recognition, no information about
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